ABSTRACT
This chapter is a review of an investigation into the nature of coherence in discourse. First there is a discussion of some things coherence isn’t, and then a discussion of several varieties of coherence. A kind of coherence, called local coherence, is described in greater detail. A set of coherence relations that may obtain between adjacent segments of locally coherent texts is derived from speakers’ typical conversational goals and defined in the framework of an inference-based natural language processing system. Finally, several investigations into belief systems based on this approach to discourse are described.
